Month: August 2015

A bout with an entirely new illness (to add to my five-week-long tussle with sinusitis) has left me with little desire to do anything productive with my time (to be fair, this illness is partly defined by severe lethargy). Thus I’ve taken time to catch up with a few movies and TV this weekend (including a sizeable chunk of Season 5 of Castle).

I could wax lyrical about the moral cesspool of How To Sell A Banksy. I could reminisce about the very first time I saw GoldenEye (aged about 8: a very eye-opening experience). I could even deconstruct everything that’s a little off about Marcus du Sautoy’s pseudo-mathematic miniseries The Code. Instead, a brief disquisition on the other high art piece I was fortunate enough to catch up on this weekend: GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra. Continue reading “GI No: The Rise of Nope-ra”→

Film theory is at a crossroads. The more I think about it, it’s more like the crazy Los Angeles freeway over/underpasses.

Is the right way intertextual/intermedial/transmedial/psychological?

Is there a right way at all?

I’ve been running a studio this semester which looks at the role of the frame in the age of digital cinema. It’s based on a conference paper I delivered in New Zealand earlier in the year, and what I’m starting to discover (in the most wonderful organic way, alongside my students) is that I barely scratched the surface of this question.

It’s not just the frame; and never really was. The frame’s intrinsic links to movement mean you have to examine the practice of cinematography as a whole; and you can’t look at cinematography without interrogating the relationship of shot to shot.

The rabbit hole I’m presently falling down is pointing to a psychological theory of cinema more akin to Bakhtin or Lacan than Bazin or Bordwell. Cinema is about perception rather than watching. We don’t just watch a film: we perceive and infer, interpreting according to our own psychological constitution.

In class last week, my students — a mix of first- and second-years — independently started discussing Deleuze’s concept of the ‘out-of-field’ and how it might relate to movement in cinema. Cinema is everything I’ve discussed: the frame, movement, editing, psychology.

I’ve never been a fan of horror cinema. I’m not sure whether that’s down to my experience of people hiring Saw LXII ad nauseum at Video Ezy, or my perhaps misguided decision to subject myself to The Exorcist, 28 Days Later, and Psycho in my formative years.

Quite why I decided, then, to watch The Awakening yesterday is beyond me, despite my undying love for the leading actress. The film is beautifully shot, as you’d expect from the BBC. The casting was just as impeccable, with Rebecca Hall aided by Dominic West, Imelda Staunton, and Bran from Game of Thrones. There were moments, while watching, where I thought I could almost be persuaded to watch more horror. The jump-scares weren’t terribly frequent, and the scripting actually wasn’t too cliched. There was a neat set-up — Hall plays a skeptic in 1920’s England, who is called upon to disprove the existence of a malevolent spirit in a remote boarding school. The context was wonderful, too: the characters have all been affected in some way by the war, and these scars (whether physical or psychological) affect their lives and their characters’ progressions.

The ending, though, left me cold — not chilled, but just cold. I think it’s endemic in a genre so rife with cliche to just take the easy way out. Having established the twist in the narrative (which I’ll leave out in case you’re keen to watch), the rest of the film fizzles, and we’re left with a question that’s pretty much already answered.

Period horror does tend to be the exception to the rule, in that you can explore historical themes and characterisation as well as the psychology of fear. There were just one too many hackneyed techniques in this one for me.